Daddy Dearest!

My father is an absolute gem.  Everybody loves him.  I've had two stepmothers and it was fairly obvious how much he was loved by Number One's family.  I don't think they were overly thrilled with ME joining the family (don't worry I don't take it personally - I was a brat!) but Dad could do no wrong.  Number Two's family feel the same way from what I've seen.  I don't blame them - he's something pretty special.

My previous skeining adventures have involved revolving office chairs (which I've just realised could have been easier had I used the "revolving" feature *rolls eyes*), boxes of different shapes and sizes and kitchen tables - the latter being the most annoying.  I want a Niddy Noddy.

I could see how they might be easy to make but I wanted to keep costs right the way down - we're not particularly flush. Okay so they are not as expensive as I thought. Lucky then that I had all the parts I needed to make one because I probably would have spent as much on “extras” considering my original design. As usual I went overboard in the design stage but luckily I had an epiphany and realised a simpler way of doing it. I was also waiting to ask Dad for his input - another lucky break. Mine isn’t going to be as beautiful as the ones you can buy but it’s also going to cost nothing.


I had some thick dowel upstairs and some thin stuff too and I really want an adjustable one that I can move to different lengths to mix up the hand painting - ie wind a skein, paint it, then rewind it at a different length so that the different colours get mixed up.

I sat with Dad as he drew it up on Auto Cad and after a few minutes made some calculations myself which he took another 15 minutes to come up with LOL. See, he’s just as bad as me. At it’s shortest it was going to be around 55cm and at it’s longest around 90cm which will give approximately 1.1 and 1.8 metre skeins. I left  it with him to make an aluminium pipe sleeve that the two separate “T’s” will slide up and down in and a pin in each end will secure the sleeve through one drilled hole to one of several holes drilled in the dowel making it totally adjustable.  Look what he came up with.....

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WOW! My stepmother came around today and dropped off the finished product and I’m just blown away.
To keep the thin dowel in place I'll use thick rubber bands and I'll also put those over the ends of the thin dowel so that the wool doesn't slip off the ends.  I cannot wait to use this.